The Big Box Charter School

Students wear name tags and
Walmart blue vests

Arkansas - The Walton family of Walmart fame has decided to open their own chain of for-profit charter schools. The first "Big Box Charter School" (BBCS) will be located in Bentonville, Arkansas which also serves as Walmart's corporate headquarters.

BBCS CEO P. Louis Bergoff announced, "Our flagship school will open its doors in August of 2014. As is the Walmart way, we will deliver a quality product while cutting costs. Thereby reaping huge profits for our investors."

Bergoff explained that the school will feature many of the same practices that have made the Walmart Corporation so profitable. "A new teacher can expect to earn $7.50 an hour, while those with experience might earn up to $12.50."

Bergoff admitted that it had been a struggle to attract qualified teachers at those wages. "American workers expect to be compensated fairly and they want things like health insurance so we decided to recruit abroad." All of the staff has been flown in from other countries including China, Haiti and Indonesia and will be housed in trailers behind the school. And since they live on campus, staff will be expected to supervise after-school activities and sports programs for no additional pay.

Bergoff bragged about other cost saving opportunities the school had already uncovered. "For instance, we are saving lots of money on cafeteria aides. Because our teachers qualify for the same free lunch program as their students, we expect them to supervise their students while they eat their government subsidized lunch in the cafeteria."

Asked if the teachers union had objected to the low pay and uncompensated additional duties, Bergoff responded, "Our company, I mean school, is union free. We have an open door policy with our employees and don't feel the need for any go-betweens. Employees can go straight to their supervisors if they have a problem and of course they are always free to seek employment elsewhere if they are unhappy."

What can students expect at the BBCS? According to the literature prepared for interested parents and made available to reporters during the press conference, students will be referred to as "associates" and issued blue vests with their names on name tags. "We think it is good practice for them," smiled Bergoff. Another hallmark of the school will be its "level of efficiency." Page two of a pamphlet describing the school day states, "We expect staff and students to regularly seek and find efficiencies. Students can expect to be timed during daily tasks by their stop watch carrying teachers and teachers can expect the same from their supervisors." Another glaring difference between the BBCS and Arkansas public schools seemed to lie in the school's curriculum which offers some unusual classes for older students such as a history class called, "The Regressive Era: How Unions Ruined America," a science class called, "Evolution Schmevolution" and a math class entitled, "How To Live On A Minimum Wage."

Representing her family, a beaming Alice Walton described the motivation for this undertaking, "For years, the Walton Family Foundation has donated money to support charter schools. Now we feel it's time they support us."

As is the Walmart way, the company/school plans to expand. "Initially we will open only one school but the following year we expect to open ten Big Box Charter Schools and we're shooting for 100 more the year after that," explained Bergoff. One can only hope.

Reality Alert: 

Interested in how we came to write this? Go to: Store Wars and The Walmart 1% and Building Tomorrow's Walmart Workers Today and The Silent Treatment: A Day In The Life Of A Student In 'No Excuses' Land

Finnished (stet)

Finnish president halts American visits to his country's schools

Helsinki - President Sauli Niinisto of Finland has called for a moratorium on tours of their schools by American visitors.

In a speech given Tuesday at the Presidential Palace, Niinisto cited both uselessness and human fatigue as reasons for discontinuing educational visits. "We are a kind and generous people and we are certainly flattered by your interest in our educational system. However, we have answered all your questions and shared all of our wisdom. It is up to the United States to actually do something with the knowledge it has gained. I believe Americans might say it is time to, 'Put up or shut up.' After all how many times can we tell you that we trust and respect teachers and don't administer standardized tests until students are almost ready for college?"

Finnish schools need a little "me time"

Moreover President Niinisto suggested the constant scrutiny was having a deleterious effect on teaching and learning. "We are exhausted from all your visits to our schools. Last year, just one of our schools hosted more than 200 reporters and 850 U.S. school superintendents. Students are having a difficult time focusing because of all the camera clicking. Teachers have no time to write lessons because they are being interviewed by reporters. Principals are so busy acting as tour guides that they have no time to run meetings or plan for the next school year. If we are to maintain our intellectual superiority, we must return to educating our populace."

President Niinisto finished his speech with these words, "We expected education reformers would do something in response to all they had learned from us but for some reason Americans just don't seem to be learning. Perhaps they have something other than improving public education as their goal."

Reality Alert: 

Interested in how we came to write this? Go to: Why Finland's Schools Are So Successful and The Global Search for Education: A Look at a Finnish School and What's So Great About Schools in Finland? and Why Are Finland's Schools Successful? and Why Finland's Unorthodox Education System Is The Best In The World and What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success and How Do Finnish Kids Excel Without Rote Learning and Standardized Testing and The Secret to Finland's Success With Schools, Moms, Kids and Everything

Replaceable You

A chart from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics illustrates
that eventually every American will be a teacher

Washington D.C. - Have you ever dreamed of being a teacher? Well whether you have or you haven't, odds are that one day you will be employed as a classroom teacher. On Tuesday, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released a report which predicted that by the year 2025 100% of Americans over the age of 24 will have worked as a teacher at some point in their life. Statistician Anzahl Lugner elaborated, "Given current trends, we feel it is inevitable that every American will eventually be able to say that he or she is or was a teacher."

How is this even possible? Lugner explained, "You've got baby boomers retiring coupled with the inevitable effects of linking teacher evaluations to student test scores. Some cities like Chicago are laying off teachers and finding cheaper and less qualified replacements while others are seeing an improving economy which has increased options for educators who feel disrespected, disgruntled and overworked. Finally, you have charter schools whose philosophy is to use up teachers and them spit 'em out." In fact, Lugner anticipates that in the very near future a 'veteran teacher' will be someone who has taught for 18 months.

According to the report, another possible ramification of high teacher turnover, will be the lowering of requirements for new teachers. Precedent for such a move already exists. For example, programs such as Teach for America wave certification requirements for incoming "teachers." It's possible that to fill empty positions, states will drop the requirement that teachers have college degrees. They might even be forced to drop the high school diploma expectation which would lead to the interesting and ironic situation of high school drop-outs teaching high school students."

When reached for comment Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, called Lugner's predictions, "Ridiculous but not surprising. The surprising thing is that anyone, anywhere wants to enter the revolving door that the teaching profession has become."

Reality Alert: 

Interested in how we came to write this? Go to: At Charter Schools, Short Careers by Choice and Teacher Attrition Up After Recession-driven Lull and Middle School Teacher Turnover High

Baby-faced Blackmailers

NYC's youngest criminals
major in reading, writing
and extortion

New York - Sometime on Thursday several elementary school students, who thought they were going on a field trip, were instead ushered into a police van and then taken to the local precinct. Their crime? The gang of eight-year-olds allegedly tried to shakedown their teachers.

At a press conference held by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr. Friday morning, prosecutors shared some information about the suspects in the plot to extort favors from two of their teachers.

D.A. Vance said that four third graders from P.S. 6, whose names were being witheld because of their youth, had been charged with several counts of larceny. Further, it was revealed that over the course of several weeks, math teacher Sharon Norbury and physical education teacher Mi Yagi were repeatedly threatened with poor evaluations by the students if they failed to cooperate with student demands.

Prosecutors shared a letter written by the students and addressed to the teachers which said, "Even through [sic] you'r [sic] jobs suk [sic] , we bet u'd [sic] like to keep them. We can make that hapen [sic] for a price."

Eventually the educators reported the blackmailers to police and agreed to wear recording devices during negotiations with the pint-sized hooligans. On the recordings you can hear students promising to give teachers positive feedback on the newly implemented Tripod Student Survey if the teachers did what the students wanted. Demands included pizza parties, providing "lots of stickers" and extra recess time.

Neither Department of Education Chancellor Dennis Walcott nor State Education Commissioner John King were available for comment about these recent developments, though they are largely responsible for giving third graders the burden/responsibility of rating teachers. However, Principal Willis DeWitt admitted that he should have known something was up, "I mean how many pizza parties can you have in one week? It was like a bacchanal in there. Kids dancing, eating paste, running with scissors, throwing Legos. One time I walked in and Ms. Norbury was tied up. She looked frightened but told me they were studying knot tying. I should have known better."

An arraignment is scheduled for Friday at 2:15pm.

Reality Alert: 

Interested in how we came to write this? Go to: King Unveils Long-Awaited Evaluations Systems For City Educators

Top Ten Reasons I Joined Teach for America by Kai Merikal

Kai is an eager
TFA recruit

Kai Merikal, a twenty-two-year-old from Wisconsin, will be teaching fourth graders in Newark, New Jersey beginning in September. Below she shares her reasons for joining Teach for America.

10.  I didn't get into law school yet.
  9.  I want to be sainted.
  8.  I believe if I believe hard enough that my students can learn, they will.
  7.  How difficult could teaching really be?
  6.  Because I'm blind to the long-term consequences of my actions.
  5.  My other temp job didn't offer health insurance.
  4.  I ran out of things to blog about.
  3.  After just two TFA years, I'm qualified to head up just about any school district
       that education reformers can get their hands on.
  2.  It's the only way I could get TFA recruiters to stop calling and emailing me.
  1.  The kids I'm going to teach are already so screwed up, how much harm can      
       having an untrained teacher do?

Reality Alert: 

Interested in how we came to write this? Go to The Three Biggest TFA Lies and Why Teach For America Is Not Welcome In My Classroom and A Glorified Temp Agency.

Common Core: Education Aberrations

Please note: This is NOT satire. 

Visited a school the other day and saw this:
How did China's command economy change in the 1980's?

To which grade was this question addressed?
Third grade, which for most kids is 8 years old. Any answer they give will only be a parrotting of what the teacher said. It will not reflect any true understanding on the part of these young students. How could it? 

It is a perfect example of the crap they pass off as education today. More difficult work does NOT automatically mean more learning - particularly when it is not cognitively appropriate. If it were otherwise, then kindergarteners should write theses.

Please share your own Common Core aberrations of education.

This Test Brought To You By....

McDonalds is just one of many
 corporations interested in the program 

Albany, NY - Responding to budget cuts, officials at New York State's Education Department unveiled a new program for public schools that has the potential to raise millions of dollars - product placement. At a press conference on Friday inside the newly named "Staples Building," Commissioner of Education Dr. John King was all smiles as he described the novel program. "With a nod to the movie-making industry and the recognition that many of our school districts are financially strapped, we have decided to allow corporations to place their product names in state and local tests administered to students throughout the year."

As described by Commissioner King, the program works much as it does in Hollywood, with corporations paying for the right to have their name (or a product's name) featured prominently during a movie or in this case, an exam. The program has already been tested at several schools around the state, including on this year's Common Core English Language Arts exam. "Oh sure, somebody always complains about something," responded King to a question about selling the state's young to the highest bidder. "But we need the money and the kids are so used to advertising anyhow. They probably won't even notice."

Students at the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts in Queens, which was part of the pilot program, may or may not have noticed that their eighth grade science exam featured several questions "bought" by corporations. For instance, one of the questions prodded students to, "Name a carnivore you see in this drawing." The drawing showed an idyllic pond surrounded by trees and animals such as hawks, deer, fish and a bear. In the background was a factory bearing the name, "Union Carbide."

Another question was sponsored by energy company Con Edison which paid to have its name placed on the roof of a building in a diagram of an electric power plant built next to a river. The accompanying question read, "Describe one positive impact on this type of power plant on the environment." Later Con Ed CEO Kevin Burke admitted that the company doesn't actually operate a single dam.

Other companies wove their product placements in more subtly. For example, one question related to the sexual reproduction of rabbits, featured a footnote that read, "Offspring can be prevented with the use of protection." Although the company's name was not present, Dr. King revealed that Church and Dwight Company, which produces Trojan condoms, had paid for that footnote.

"Sometimes a company wants to put out a message but not have their name directly affiliated with that message and we're o.k. with that," explained King. Though the Commissioner was all smiles at the press conference, there have been some hitches.

Commissioner King enthusiastically
described the program.

An anonymous source at New York's Education Department revealed that Walmart was hoping to sponsor the United States History and Government Regents Examination. However, the company objected to the number and nature of questions related to the rise of labor unions. The state refused to change the questions on the test but a spokesperson said that they might reconsider for next year's exam, "If the price was right." And Walmart wasn't the only disappointed corporation. Although R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company negotiated for days with an elementary school in Somers, NY, they were unable to convince officials to place sunglasses on the picture of a camel which accompanied a story about the desert on a third grade English exam.

Still King is enthusiastic about the program's potential. "It could raise an enormous amount of money for some really strapped schools." He gleefully pointed out that Citicorp, Goldman Sachs and AIG are currently in a "very competitive bidding war" to gain the rights to sponsor every exam given at Stuyvesant High School, located in the financial district. "I think they see a natural affiliation with the student body," commented King. "I have instructed my staff that their top priority is to speed and facilitate negotiations between interested parties so that we can see the results on this year's tests and of course in our budgets."

When asked if he saw anything ironic in Dunkin' Donuts sponsoring the final exam for a Mt. Vernon High School class entitled, "Nutrition for the 21st Century," Commissioner King said he would not make such judgments. "Our attitude is that everything is open for discussion."

Several corporation heads were also on hand to answer questions from reporters including, Pepsico's CEO Indra Nooyi. She described the opportunity as, "a marketing dream." "Getting our message out to young people when they are in an excited state, as they most certainly are during an exam, is giving us the chance to create a mental tattoo for our brand." Pepsico paid an undisclosed amount to place their Frito Lay brand throughout the health class midterms at Niagra Falls High School.

Although not yet sponsors, the Education Department admitted that they are currently in negotiation with several high profile companies including: Anheuser-Busch, ExxonMobil, Dow Chemical, BP Global and Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.

Reality Alert: 

Interested in how we came to write this? Go to New Standardized Tests Feature Plugs for Commercial Products and Learn ABC's - & IBM's.